The video footage shown here was captured in June 2013 in one of the many ethnic Ewe communities situated along the coast of southeastern Ghana and southern Togo. This brief scene shows one sequence of a much larger fetatrotro vodu ceremony, a three day celebratory festival meant to honor and venerate the vodu spirits as well as eat, drink, sing, drum, and dance along with them.

It’s past midnight at the offices of The Arab American News, the nation’s most popular and longest running Arabic-English newspaper, and the staff is rushing to finish this week’s edition before the print deadline.

The way the media has reported it, outsiders are likely to see Hamtramck, Michigan as the epitome of racial and religious strife in the United States. In November, it became the first city in the country to elect a Muslim-majority city council.

Palestinian-American community leader Rasmea Odeh on Thursday was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison over immigration fraud, a lenient jail term considering the prosecution’s call for her to serve five to seven years.

Gorovodu is the dominant religion of the area and central to the physical and social well-being of ethnic Ewe vodu practitioners in the greater Volta region. Though ethno-pharmacological and anthropological research has focused on African medicine for quite some time...